There’s a moment in most people’s childhoods, usually around the third or fourth viewing of the 1939 film, when it hits you that something about The Wizard of Oz is a little different. Dorothy doesn’t need a prince. Nobody is waiting for a man to fix things. The most powerful people in the entire story, for better and occasionally for worse, are women. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it as a kid. I just knew the story felt like it ran on different rules than the other fairy tales on my shelf, the ones where the girl slept until a stranger’s kiss woke her up, or got married as a reward for being pretty and patient.
It turns out I wasn’t imagining things. L. Frank Baum, a failed chicken breeder, failed actor, and failed shopkeeper who stumbled into being one of the most influential children’s authors in American history, built his most famous world on a foundation that quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, argued women belonged in charge. He didn’t do this by accident, and he didn’t do it in a vacuum. He did it because of the women in his own life, and he did it at a moment in American history when the idea was still radical enough to get you laughed out of a room, or in some cases, out of a state legislature.
Let’s talk about how a Gilded Age failure of a businessman ended up writing two of the more quietly subversive female characters in early twentieth century literature, and why the women behind the curtain of his own life mattered just as much as the ones he put on the page.
The Man Who Married Into a Revolution
Baum’s path to Oz was not a straight line. Before he became a bestselling author, he ran a general store that went bankrupt, edited a small newspaper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and worked as a traveling salesman for a glassware company. None of that screams “future architect of a beloved fantasy universe.” What Baum did have, consistently, was proximity to strong-willed, politically engaged women, starting with the one he married.
In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, a woman who had left one of Cornell University’s earliest classes for women to marry him. That decision did not sit well with her mother. Maud’s mother was Matilda Joslyn Gage, and if you’ve never heard of her, that’s sort of the point of this section. Gage was a serious force in the nineteenth century women’s rights movement, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and co-authoring the early volumes of History of Woman Suffrage. According to Baum biographer Michael Patrick Hearn, Gage held views on the separation of church and state and on organized religion’s role in suppressing women that were considered too radical even by some of her fellow suffragists, which is part of why her name has faded while Anthony’s likeness ended up on a coin.
Gage didn’t think much of Baum when he showed up asking to marry her daughter. She reportedly called him an impractical dreamer and worried, not unreasonably given his track record, that he couldn’t support a family. But over time, something shifted. Gage lived with the Baums for stretches of her life, and by most accounts she and Baum grew close. She read him her writing. She talked to him about the suppressed history of women’s power, including her research into the witch archetype and how accusations of witchcraft had historically been used to silence and control women. Baum was absorbing all of this years before he ever wrote a word about a girl from Kansas.
He wasn’t just absorbing it passively, either. While editing the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in South Dakota, Baum ran an editorial called “Equal Suffrage Notes” in the paper’s very first issue, and he served as secretary of Aberdeen’s Equal Suffrage Club. When South Dakota put women’s suffrage to a statewide vote in 1890, Baum was one of the more visible supporters of the measure. It lost. Women in South Dakota would not get the vote through that referendum, and Baum would not live to see the country get there either. He died in 1919, a year before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Dorothy: The Girl Who Didn’t Wait for Rescue
By the time Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, he had spent a decade watching a suffrage campaign fail in real time and absorbing the worldview of a woman the movement itself had mostly forgotten. What he produced was a book that scholars now regularly describe as one of the earliest genuinely feminist works of American children’s literature, largely because of what Dorothy does and doesn’t do.
What she doesn’t do is wait. Dorothy is dropped into a strange country, and instead of looking for someone to save her, she starts walking. She recruits allies rather than depending on them. She’s the one who ultimately outwits the Wizard, exposing him as a fraud hiding behind a curtain and machinery rather than a man of real power. She kills two witches, mostly by accident, and gets credit for both. Compare that to the European fairy tale tradition Baum grew up reading, full of girls who are acted upon rather than acting, whose reward for patience and beauty is a wedding to whichever prince shows up. Dorothy’s reward for courage and persistence is getting to go home, on her own terms, having solved her own problem.
And then there’s the world she’s dropped into. Oz is, structurally, a matriarchy hiding in plain sight inside a children’s book. The most powerful figures in the land are witches. Glinda rules the Quadling Country with real authority and real competence. The men Dorothy encounters along the way are missing something essential, a heart, a brain, courage, and have to be completed, while the witches are already whole. It’s not subtle once you notice it, and it clearly wasn’t accidental given who Baum was listening to at the time he wrote it.
It’s worth pausing on how unusual the witches themselves were for 1900. Baum didn’t invent the idea of a witch in children’s literature, obviously, but he split the archetype in a way that hadn’t been done quite like this before. There’s a genuinely wicked witch of the west, sure, but there’s also Glinda, a good witch who governs a whole quadrant of the country with real political authority, and the unnamed good witch of the north who protects Dorothy from the moment she arrives. Power itself isn’t the problem in Oz. What matters is what a person does with it. That’s a meaningfully different message than the one most fairy tales of the era were sending, where a woman wielding real power was usually the villain by default, and the heroine’s only job was to be pretty, patient, and eventually rescued.
Ozma: The Wildest Swing Baum Ever Took
If Dorothy is Baum’s argument that a girl doesn’t need rescuing, Ozma is Baum’s argument that womanhood itself is the correct and rightful state of power, stated so directly it’s almost startling for a book published in 1904.
Ozma doesn’t show up as Ozma in The Marvelous Land of Oz. She shows up as Tip, a boy being raised by the witch Mombi, who serves as the book’s protagonist for most of its length. It’s only near the end that Tip learns the truth: he is actually Ozma, the rightful princess and heir to the throne of Oz, who was transformed into a boy as an infant and hidden away by Mombi so that no one would find and restore the true ruler. Glinda and Tip’s friends have to talk him into accepting the transformation back into Ozma, since by that point he’s spent his whole remembered life as a boy and isn’t thrilled about the change. He goes through with it anyway, because Ozma has a duty to Oz that Tip does not.
Once restored, Ozma becomes the permanent, beloved ruler of Oz for the rest of the series, a wise, fair, and famously kind monarch who Baum treats as the ideal head of state. The book is built around the idea that the “true” and rightful form of its central character is a girl, and that restoring the land to its proper order requires putting a woman on the throne. For a children’s book written a full sixteen years before American women could vote in a presidential election, that’s a genuinely bold thing to put in front of young readers.
Jinjur’s Army and the Part of the Story That Complicates Things
Here’s where the picture gets less tidy, and honestly, more interesting. The Marvelous Land of Oz also introduces General Jinjur and her Army of Revolt, four hundred girls who march on the Emerald City armed with knitting needles and overthrow the Scarecrow, who had been running things since the Wizard left. Jinjur’s justification is blunt: the Emerald City has been ruled by men long enough, and it’s time for a change.
Once in charge, Jinjur’s regime is played largely for laughs. She lounges on the throne eating caramels while the men of the city are put to work cooking and minding children, and the men complain, loudly, about how exhausting housework turns out to be. The revolt collapses fairly quickly, in part because the army scatters in terror at the sight of a few mice.
Scholars and Oz historians have long connected Jinjur’s rebellion to the suffrage movement Baum was surrounded by, and to his mother-in-law specifically, though there’s genuine disagreement about what exactly Baum was doing with it. Some read it as a gentle, affectionate poke at the movement he actually supported, the kind of in-house teasing you do about a cause you believe in. Others read it as a more pointed jab, playing into the era’s stereotype of suffragists as flighty and unserious. What almost everyone agrees on is that the story doesn’t end with Jinjur’s failure as its final word on women in power. It ends with Ozma, a woman Baum portrays as wise and legitimate, ascending to permanent rule, while the men who briefly held the throne step aside for good. Whatever Baum meant by Jinjur, he clearly didn’t mean it as an argument against women ruling Oz. He meant it, if anything, as an argument against the wrong woman ruling it.
A Man Ahead of His Country, If Not Entirely Ahead of His Time
It would be a stretch, and probably unfair to the actual complexity of the man, to call Baum a flawless feminist icon. He was writing inside the assumptions of his era even when he was pushing against them, and some of that shows in how he handled characters like Jinjur. But it’s hard to overstate how unusual it was for a mainstream children’s author in 1900 and 1904 to build entire books around the idea that girls could be the heroes of their own stories and that women could be the rightful, competent rulers of a kingdom, without a man ever needing to take the reins back for good.
Baum got there because he married into a family that included one of the most radical thinkers of the nineteenth century women’s movement, and because he apparently listened when she talked. Matilda Joslyn Gage never got her face on a coin, and she died in 1898, two years before her son-in-law published the book that would eventually make Dorothy Gale one of the most recognizable characters in American culture. But Dorothy’s refusal to wait for rescue and Ozma’s rightful place on the throne both carry a little bit of Gage’s fingerprints, whether history remembers her for it or not.
Baum died a year before the country he’d spent part of his life advocating for finally extended the vote to women. He didn’t get to see the ending he’d been arguing for since his newspaper days in Aberdeen. But he spent two decades writing girls and women who already lived in the world he was hoping for, one book at a time, for an audience of children who wouldn’t think twice about a witch running a country or a princess solving her own problems. Sometimes that’s how the slow arguments get made. Not from a podium, but from a bookshelf.
What’s your earliest memory of Dorothy, Ozma, or one of the witches of Oz? Did any of these characters shape how you thought about who gets to be the hero of a story? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
